Liberating Public Lands

Federal and state governments control more than one-third of all land in America. What distinguishes these more than 785 million acres of “public lands” from the rest—including the land your home sits on—is that, at some point, the government decided only it could ensure that these lands would be used wisely.

Presumably, most people want the remaining two-thirds of American lands to be used wisely, too. So it’s interesting that the government doesn’t apply the same logic to these. Would we be better off if bureaucrats made all decisions about what to build and where to build it; what crops to plant and where to plant them; where you may live, the size of your lot, what you may and may not do in that area, and so on?

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About Jon Hersey

Jon Hersey is the associate editor of The Objective Standard. His work focuses on intellectual history, specifically, the ideas on which freedom and flourishing depend. He has published in-depth articles on John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Stark, William Wilberforce, Rosa Parks, and more.

Endnotes

Acknowledgments: I’d like to thank Don Watkins for his very patient and instructive editing on many earlier drafts of this article. I’d also like to thank Adam Mossoff, Raymond Niles, Timothy Sandefur, Jonathan Wood, and Craig Franklin for their helpful feedback.

6. “Land Areas of the National Forest System,” U.S. Department of Agriculture: Forest Service, January 2012, https://www.fs.fed.us/land/staff/lar/LAR2011/LAR2011_Book_A5.pdf; The USFS’s 193 million acres equals about 781,043 km2. The total area of Texas is about 695,662 km2, and the total area of South Carolina is about 82,933 km2. Together they equal 778,595 km2, which is 2,448 km2less than the total area controlled by the USFS. These numbers come from “List of U.S. States and Territories by Area,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_area (accessed November 13, 2018).

8. Alison Berry, “Forest Policy Up in Smoke: Fire Suppression in the United States,” Property and Environmental Research Center, https://www.perc.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/Forest_Policy_Up_in_Smoke.pdf (accessed February 24, 2019).

17. For instance, in February 1999, Forest Service Chief Michael Dombeck announced an eighteen-month road-building moratorium on 130 national forests. This became the basis for a directive issued by President Clinton during his last days in office, which prohibited virtually all roadbuilding, logging, and mining of coal, oil, and natural gas on 58 million acres of national forest lands. See “The Roadless Rule,” Earth Justice, https://earthjustice.org/features/timeline-of-the-roadless-rule.

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